Enjoy Your Nation As Yourself(1).

pdf
(292 KB) Pobierz
[1]
C h a p t e r 4 0
Slavoj Zizek
ENJOY YOUR NATION AS
YOURSELF!
Eastern Europe? The answer seems obvious: what fascinated the Western gaze was the
reinvention of Democracy. It is as if democracy, which in theWest shows more and more
signs of decay
and crisis and is lost in bureaucratic routine and publicity-style election campaigns, is
being rediscovered
in Eastern Europe in all its freshness and novelty. The function of this fascination is thus
purely
ideological: in Eastern Europe, theWest seeks for its own lost origins, its own lost original
experience
of democratic invention. In other words, Eastern Europe functions for theWest as its
Ego Ideal (Ich-
Ideal): the point from whichWest sees itself in a likeable, idealized form, as worthy of
love.The real
object of fascination for the West is thus the gaze, namely the supposedly naive gaze by
means of
which Eastern Europe stares back at theWest, fascinated by its democracy. It is as if the
Eastern Gaze
is still able to perceive in Western societies its own agalma, the treasure that causes
democratic
enthusiasm and that theWest has long ago lost the taste of.
The reality emerging now in Eastern Europe is, however, a disturbing distortion of this
idyllic
picture of the two mutually fascinated gazes: the gradual retreat of the liberal-democratic
tendency
in the face of the growth of corporate national populism which includes all its usual
elements, from
xenophobia to anti-Semitism.To explain this unexpected turn, we have to rethink the
most elementary
notions about national identification and here, psychoanalysis can be of help.
The theft of enjoyment
The element which holds together a given community cannot be reduced to the point of
symbolic
identification: the bond linking together its members always implies a shared
relationship toward a
H Y W A S T H E W E S T so fascinated by the disintegration of Communism in
E N J OY YO UR N AT I O N A S YO UR S E L F !
Thing, toward Enjoyment incarnated. This relationship toward theThing, structured by
means of
fantasies, is what is at stake when we speak of the menace to our way of life presented
by the Other:
it is what is threatened when, for example, a white Englishman is panicked because of the
growing
presence of aliens.What he wants to defend at any price is not reducible to the so-
called set of values
that offer support to national identity. National identification is by definition sustained
by a relationship
toward the Nation quaThing.This Nation-Thing is determined by a series of contradictory
properties.
It appears to us as ourThing (perhaps we could say cosa nostra), as something
accessible only to us,
as something they, the others, cannot grasp; nonetheless it is something constantly
menaced by
them. It appears as what gives plenitude and vivacity to our life, and yet the only way
we can
determine it is by resorting to different versions of the same empty tautology. All we can
ultimately
say about it is that theThing is itself, the realThing, what it really is about, etc. If
we are asked
how we can recognize the presence of this Thing, the only consistent answer is that the
Thing is
present in that elusive entity called our way of life. All we can do is enumerate
disconnected
fragments of the way our community organizes its feasts, its rituals of mating, its
initiation ceremonies,
in short, all the details by which is made visible the unique way a community organizes
its enjoyment.
Although the first, so to speak, automatic association that arises here is of course that of
the
reactionary sentimental Blut und Boden, we should not forget that such a reference to
the way of life
can also have a distinctive leftist connotation. Note George Orwells essays from the
war years, in
which he attempted to define the contours of an English patriotism opposed to the
official, stuffy
imperialist version of it. His points of reference were precisely those details that
characterize the way
of life of the working class (the evening gathering in the local pub, etc.).
It would, however, be erroneous simply to reduce the nationalThing to the features
composing
a specific way of life.TheThing is not directly a collection of these features; there is
something more
in it, something that is present in these features, that appears through them. Members of
a community
who partake in a given way of life believe in their Thing, where this belief has a
reflexive structure
proper to the intersubjective space: I believe in the (national)Thing equals I believe
that others
(members of my community) believe in the Thing. The tautological character of the
Thing its
semantic void which limits what we can say about theThing to It is the realThing, etc.
is founded
precisely in this paradoxical reflexive structure.The nationalThing exists as long as
members of the
community believe in it; it is literally an effect of this belief in itself.The structure is here
the same as
that of the Holy Spirit in Christianity.The Holy Spirit is the community of believers in
which Christ
lives after his death: to believe in Him equals believing in belief itself, i.e., believing that
Im not alone, that
Im a member of the community of believers. I do not need any external proof or
confirmation of the
truth of my belief: by the mere act of my belief in others belief, the Holy Spirit is here. In
other words,
the whole meaning of theThing turns on the fact that it means something to people.
This paradoxical existence of an entity which is only insofar as subjects believe (in the
others
belief) in its existence is the mode of being proper to ideological causes: the normal
order of
596 S L AV O J ZIZEK
causality is here inverted, since it is the Cause itself which is produced by its effects (the
ideological
practices it animates). Significantly, it is precisely at this point that the difference
between Lacan and
discursive idealism emerges most forcefully: Lacan does not reduce the (national, etc.)
Cause to a
performative effect of the discursive practices that refer to it.The pure discursive effect
does not have
enough substance to compel the attraction proper to a Cause and the L.acanian term
for the
strange substance which must be added so that a Cause obtains its positive ontological
consistency,
the only substance acknowledged by psychoanalysis, is of course enjoyment (as Lacan
states it explicitly
in Encore ). A nation exists only as long as its specific enjoyment continues to be
materialized in a set of
social practices and transmitted through national myths that structure these practices.To
emphasize
in a deconstructionist mode that Nation is not a biological or transhistorical fact but a
contingent
discursive construction, an overdetermined result of textual practices, is thus misleading:
such an
emphasis overlooks the remainder of some real, nondiscursive kernel of enjoyment which
must be
present for the Nation qua discursive entity-effect to achieve its ontological consistency.
Nationalism thus presents a privileged domain of the eruption of enjoyment into the
social field.
The national Cause is ultimately nothing but the way subjects of a given ethnic
community organize
their enjoyment through national myths. What is therefore at stake in ethnic tensions is
always the
possession of the nationalThing.We always impute to the other an excessive
enjoyment: he wants
to steal our enjoyment (by ruining our way of life) and/or he has access to some secret,
perverse
enjoyment. In short, what really bothers us about the other is the peculiar way he
organizes his
enjoyment, precisely the surplus, the excess that pertains to this way: the smell of
their food, their
noisy songs and dances, their strange manners, their attitude to work.To the racist,
the other is
either a workaholic stealing our jobs or an idler living on our labor, and it is quite
amusing to notice
the haste with which one passes from reproaching the other with a refusal to work to
reproaching
him for the theft of work.The basic paradox is that ourThing is conceived as something
inaccessible
to the other and at the same time threatened by him. [. . .]
Capitalism without capitalism
What sets in motion this logic of the theft of enjoyment is of course not immediate
social reality
the reality of different ethnic communities living closely together but the inner
antagonism inherent in
the communities. It is possible to have a multitude of ethnic communities living side by
side without
racial tensions (like the Amish and neighboring communities in Pennsylvania); on the
other hand, one
does not need a lot of real Jews to impute to them some mysterious enjoyment that
threatens us (it
is a well-known fact that in Nazi Germany, anti-Semitism was most ferocious in those
parts where
there were almost no Jews; in todays exEast Germany, the anti-Semitic Skinheads
outnumber Jews
by ten to one). Our perception of real Jews is always mediated by a symbolic
ideological structure
which tries to cope with social antagonism: the real secret of the Jew is our own
antagonism. In
todays America, for example, a role resembling that of the Jew is played more and more
by the
E N J OY YO UR N AT I O N A S YO UR S E L F !
Japanese.Witness the obsession of the American media with the idea that Japanese dont
know how
to enjoy themselves.The reason for the growing Japanese economic superiority over the
U.S.A. is
located in the somewhat mysterious fact that the Japanese dont consume enough, that
they accumulate
too much wealth. If we look closely at the logic of this accusation, it soon becomes clear
that what
American spontaneous ideology really reproaches the Japanese for is not simply their
inability to
take pleasure but rather the fact that their very relationship between work and enjoyment
is strangely
distorted. It is as if they find an enjoyment in their very renunciation of pleasure, in their
zeal, in their inability
to take it easy, relax, and enjoy and it is this attitude which is perceived as a threat to
American
supremacy.Thus theAmerican media report with such evident relief how Japanese are
finally learning
to consume, and why AmericanTV depicts with such self-satisfaction Japanese tourists
staring at the
wonders of the American pleasure-industry: finally they are becoming like us, learning
our way of
enjoying.
It is too easy to dispose of this problematic by pointing out that what we have here is
simply the
transposition, the ideological displacement, of the effective socioeconomic antagonisms
of todays
capitalism.The problem is that, while this is undoubtedly true, it is precisely through
such a displacement
that desire is constituted. What we gain by transposing the perception of inherent social
antagonisms into
the fascination with the Other (Jew, Japanese . . .) is the fantasy-organization of
desire.The Lacanian
thesis that enjoyment is ultimately always enjoyment of the Other, i.e., enjoyment
supposed, imputed
to the Other, and that, conversely, the hatred of the Others enjoyment is always the
hatred of ones
own enjoyment, is perfectly exemplified by this logic of the theft of enjoyment. What
are fantasies
about the Others special, excessive enjoyment about the blacks superior sexual
potency and
appetite, about the Jews or Japaneses special relationship toward money and work if
not precisely
so many ways, for us, to organize our own enjoyment? Do we not find enjoyment
precisely in fantasizing
about the Others enjoyment, in this ambivalent attitude toward it? Do we not obtain
satisfaction by
means of the very supposition that the Other enjoys in a way inaccessible to us? Does not
the Others
enjoyment exert such a powerful fascination because in it we represent to ourselves our
own
innermost relationship toward enjoyment? And, conversely, is the anti-Semitic
capitalists hatred of
the Jew not the hatred of the excess that pertains to capitalism itself, i.e., of the excess
produced by
its inherent antagonistic nature? Is capitalisms hatred of the Jew not the hatred of its
own innermost,
essential feature? For this reason, it is not sufficient to point out how the racists Other
presents a
threat to our identity.We should rather inverse this proposition: the fascinating image of
the Other
gives a body to our own innermost split, to what is in us more than ourselves and thus
prevents us
from achieving full identity with ourselves. The hatred of the Other is the hatred of our
own excess of
enjoyment.
The nationalThing functions thus as a kind of particular Absolute resisting
universalization, bestowing
its special tonality upon every neutral, universal notion. It is for that reason that the
eruption of the
nationalThing in all its violence has always taken by surprise the devotees of
international solidarity.
Perhaps the most traumatic case was the debacle of the international solidarity of the
workers
598 S L AV O J ZIZEK
movement in the face of patriotic euphoria at the outbreak of the First World War.
Today, it is
difficult to imagine what a traumatic shock it was for the leaders of all currents of social
democracy,
from Edouard Bernstein to Lenin, when the social-democratic parties of all countries
(with the
exception of the Bolsheviks in Russia and Serbia) gave way to chauvinist outbursts and
patriotically
stood behind their respective governments, oblivious of the proclaimed solidarity of
the working
class without country.This shock, the powerless fascination felt by its participants,
bears witness to an
encounter with the Real of enjoyment. That is to say, the basic paradox is that these
chauvinist
outbursts of patriotic feeling were far from unexpected.Years before the actual
outbreak of the war,
social democracy alerted workers to how imperialist forces were preparing for a new
world war, and
warned them against yielding to patriotic chauvinism. Even at the very outbreak of the
war, i.e., in
the days following the Sarajevo assassination, the German social democrats cautioned
workers that
the ruling class would use the assassination as an excuse to declare war. Furthermore, the
Socialist
International adopted a formal resolution obliging all its members to vote against war
credits in the
case of war.With the outbreak of the war, international solidarity vanished into thin air.
An anecdote
about how this overnight reversal took Lenin by surprise is significant: when he saw the
daily
newspaper of German social democracy, announcing on its front page that the social-
democratic
deputies had voted for the war credits, he was at first convinced that this issue was
fabricated by
German police to lead workers astray! [. . .]
The blind spot of liberalism
Paradoxically, we could say that what Eastern Europe needs most now is more alienation:
the
establishment of an alienated State which would maintain its distance from the civil
society, which
would be formal, empty, i.e., which would not embody any particular ethnic
communitys dream
(and thus keep the space open for them all). Is, then, the solution for Eastern Europes
present woes
simply a larger dose of liberal democracy? The picture we have presented seems to point
in this
direction: Eastern Europe cannot start to live in peace and true pluralist democracy
because of the
specter of nationalism, i.e., because the disintegration of Communism opened up the
space for the
emergence of nationalist obsessions, provincialism, anti-Semitism, hatred of all that
comes from
abroad, ideology of a threat to the nation, antifeminism, and a postsocialist moral
majority inclusive
of a pro-life movement in short, enjoyment in its entire irrationality.Yet what is
deeply suspicious
about this attitude, about the attitude of an antinationalist, liberal Eastern European
intellectual, is
the already-mentioned obvious fascination exerted on him by nationalism: liberal
intellectuals refuse
it, mock it, laugh at it, yet at the same time stare at it with powerless fascination. The
intellectual
pleasure procured by denouncing nationalism is uncannily close to the satisfaction of
successfully
explaining ones own impotence and failure (which always was a trademark of a certain
kind of
Marxism). On another level, Western liberal intellectuals are often caught in a similar
trap: the
1. http://chomikuj.pl/margozap/In+English/Books/eBooks/Non-
Fiction/Individual+Authors/*c5*bdi*c5*beek*2c+Slavoj/Enjoy+Your+Nation+As+Yourself(1),1124900759.pdf
affirmation of their own autochthonous tradition is for them a red-neck horror, a site of
populist